The Forever Watch (15 page)

It's not my place to know. I would have accepted that, once.

I never repeated that night where I checked on Barrens's activities using other ident codes. I told myself I wouldn't ask until he was ready. But if he wants me to stop just blindly accepting what ISec says is proper …

It's not nagging. It isn't. “Hey, you. Been putting a lot of work in growing our baby?”

“Mrraaagr. Backscatter. Signal stuff. Routing,” he mumbles. “Dijkstra. You know.
Stuff
. Been looking for ways to hide information as Network background noise.”

“What are the comms for?”

He blinks, wakes up a little at the tone of my voice. Really looks at me. “I'm almost there,” he says softly. “I will tell you, and it will be soon.”

“You better.”

“I will.” He pauses.

Barren's fingers turn my face gently. Ah. Wow. It is a long, lingering kiss, while another hand slides up from my waist, under my shirt. So hard, those hands, and rough; it still surprises me how gentle they can be. He pulls a moan out of me.

A little breathless now. “Good morning to you too.”

He grins. Pleased with himself. He drops into the other chair, which creaks with his weight. He savors each bite of the eggs, grimaces, and bolts down the cheap stuff. I like to watch him eat. He is not sloppy or disgusting. But food vanishes in front of him. Heaping spoonfuls, chewed rapidly, neatly, swallowed down. And he is always appreciative.

Another slow kiss after we're done.

“Unless you're going to take the morning off,” I get out, “you'd better stop that.”

His grin is boyish. “Yeah, yeah.”

“What time will you be by?”

“I don't know. I'll message you.”

We leave together and split up at the street.

By the time I reach City Planning, I suspect I still have a somewhat dazed smile on my face. I'd best not be thinking about those smoldering kisses where Hennessy can peer at me and do his best impression of a Behavioralist. His teasing gibes are playful, but they can be sharp and too perceptive. I ought to put my foot down and remind him that I'm his superior … but I do like him. And he is quite good at what he does.

It says something about society that the most exciting thing in the office to gossip about is the boss's love life.

“They think he's beneath you, that's all,” Hennessy remarks as he drops off another packet of proposals. “That makes it juicier. Now, now, don't get upset.”

“I'm not upset.” I am upset.

“It's not what I think. I think he's been good for you. You've looked a lot more alive. Since the two of you got together. But you know, the whole society is built around metrics, test scores, assigning every person like pegs to their holes. When people see you together, and it's obvious there's a, ah, rank gap … People wonder about what the two of you have in common, what you do together, and such.”

Rank gap!

“James, I've been letting this go for too long. It's one thing if it's you. But the rest of the team … Get them focused on their work. Cool off talk about Barrens and me, okay? Or the worst offenders will find themselves buried in the secretarial pool.”

He raises his hands in surrender. “I'll warn them.”

The next proposals to come in front of me are subjected to my most vicious evaluation, with endless corrections and brutal comments. So there.

 

 

Barrens comes at lunch, a great big presence in my doorway. To everyone else, his face probably looks its usual fierce and focused best. But to me, the nervous anxiety is plain. He is worried.

He almost lifts me out of my chair and hugs me too tightly.

Leon! Not in the office!
He lets me push back a bit, though his hands stay on my shoulders.

“You're okay,” he whispers. “Anything, ah. Anything odd happen around here lately?”

“No. What's this about?”

“Let's take a walk. The bean-dog stand down the block's got a special today, two for one.”

I ought to be annoyed. He is almost dragging me. People are staring. But there is such fear on his face. Fear for me. Every once in a while, he pauses, glows with psi for a second, cranes his neck and inhales, long and deep. He leads me to the plaza two blocks away from the monolithic cube of City Planning. A large fountain in the middle is festooned with baroque statues, marble figures of imposing, muscular angels and fat, little cherubs. And we keep walking.

What is it?

Someone is onto us.

“What?”

My knees want to give way. A thousand terrors spark and come alive, and I clamp down on them hard, pasting a mask of calm on my face, even as my heart seems to grow determined to escape out of my chest.

Barrens takes a breath to compose himself. He sends me brief flashes of memory.

Bruisers,
when they use their talent, also have enhanced senses. But I do not have his training. And since I have to keep walking by his side, I can only do a partial immersion, so the contents are further removed from me. All I can tell is that they are brief moments several seconds long. One was from that day he was watching me interview Gorovsky. The others have him standing at various locations, neck craned, looking around. Standing at a sidewalk. The chowder place we like.
What do you want me to see?

There's a scent! A scent keeps repeating. I didn't think anything of it at first, but this morning, I smelled it again while doing my run. It just clicked in my head. Someone is closing in on us.

The concentration required to form Implant-to-Implant messages distracts me from panicking. Staves off the formless anxiety skittering up my spine. In my imagination, there is already a thin man in ISec grays on our heels.

We walk and talk on the move. Sometimes we talk out loud and sometimes we message each other in our heads.

The major streets of the Habitat tend to be oriented in concentric loops from the smallest ring road in the heart of the Dome to Circle-zero, the twelve-lane highway just inside the Dome. Most of the lesser streets are a grid of straight lines with names indicating which section that stretch of road is in, and either a number, indicating a port-to-starboard orientation, or a letter, which means the road runs along the length of the ship. Some of the roads are at Deck-zero, the street level of the Habitat, some rise up into the sky, and some descend into the underside of the Habitat.

Only the top few hundred officers of the ship are allowed to have private vehicles. The rest of the crew in their tens of thousands walk, take the bus, take the train, ride bicycles. Around us, men and women in practical steel or slate or coal business attire or uniform jumpsuits laugh on their way to get food.

For an hour we zigzag along the Thames Streets. From the picturesque little, apple-tree-lined, pseudo-cobblestone Thames 3 Street to the four-lane Thames F Street with its midrange retail clothing stores. The mannequins in false silk and suede wave to us as we turn onto the 5, lined with small office buildings, mostly subcenters for accounting and ship-inventory management—three-floor, gray cubelets that report to City Planning. We walk the bridge over a picturesque stream called the Thames, ever so much smaller than the real one was. We pass corner pubs and little shops with replicas of precious authentic antiques preserved in nonreactive-gas vessels under nondamaging low-energy light. Soon, we reach the ring road Thames Central, set around an arc-shaped public-access park.

Along the little brick footpaths under the sun or under the shade of trees in autumn foliage, we wonder if we need to run, while we talk as if it is still we who are the hunters.

“If this stranger is following us based on our Web accesses, which I am pretty sure is nearly impossible, then he would be appearing at the places from which we have logged in with the dangling IDs—locations that are far apart, and which we do not use more than once. Or he could have traced it to us directly, in which case he would already know exactly who we are.”

“Can't be,” Barrens says. “Can't.” He sends me a map of the city, with points lit up indicating where he's come across the stranger's scent. This individual, and Barrens is sure that it is an individual male, is somehow tracking us physically, from location to location.

How? Could a
bruiser
scent-track us like that?

Barrens shakes his head.
No. Even when we use the talent, we're no bloodhounds. And even specially bred dogs can only track scent trails that are several days old. This guy's appearing at places we were at a month before or more. I can't figure out how he's doing it.

“Are you sure it's just one man?”

“Yeah, I'm sure.”
I've searched my Implant plenty, trying to cross-index scents. Only this guy appears repeatedly, and he only started showing after we started. He's not from my precinct, he doesn't work at City Planning, he's never been around your friends.

There is at least the relief that it is not Information Security. Or we would already be in their custody

Could it happen by random chance? I could run the odds in my head, based on population concentrations and City Planning studies on crew residence and job location. Probabilities won't give me an answer one way or another.

I choose to have faith in Barrens's instinct. Unfortunately, there is no crew database identification category for
scent
!

He lets out a grim chuckle when I complain about this.
You can certainly propose it to the database guys above me. I'm sure you could make a very convincing study.

A thought strikes me, and I shiver.
Leon. Did you detect this scent when Callahan died?

I didn't have an amplifier on me that day.

Around us, ordinary men and women in business attire are finishing up their coffees and sandwiches and cigarettes. The younger kids are done with classes for the day; a handful of girls and boys play around the fountain, splashing each other with telekinetic bursts. It is a beautiful day in the fall, bright and cool, pleasant as only Hennessy's best could program into the simulation parameters.

Do you think it's Mincemeat?

I don't know what to think.

Too soon, we have to return to work.

He pleads with me. He never does that. “Please. Just be careful, okay?”

“I will.”
Leon. It's you who needs to watch yourself. He's closer to finding you than me.

I can take care of myself.

I want to protest that I can take care of myself too. Shit. I don't even always keep my civilian self-defense bracelet on me. Something I will change immediately.

He gives me a fierce, almost angry kiss, right as we reach the base of the steps leading up to my ugly, gray office building. A sigh escapes me; it would be just that kind of day someone from my team would be looking out through the right window exactly at this moment.

“Wait for me later. I'll take you home.”

“Okay.”

We let go and walk away from each other. Both looking over our shoulders.

 

 

The rest of my workday would be a total waste if I let it. I indulge in just fifteen minutes of this. My head buzzing with possibilities. Petrified in my chair. My eyes note the reports in front of me, but I just cannot take them in. All the while, my team is quietly doing their thing,
too quietly,
which means they are all chatting with each other Implant to Implant, probably about what looks like a fight between Barrens and me.

Then I shake it off, put it aside. I need to work, so I work. Mala's mental tricks shunt aside emotion, grant me clarity and focus and emptiness. I open five files at once; they float over the desk, visible only to me, as I pull out the paper reports and begin to cross-reference them with the live data in the Nth Web.

Finally, the day is done. Barrens and I meet up, ignoring, once again, my coworkers' curious gazes, and go to my place.

“No,” I tell him.

His face goes all tight. “Gotta find him first. Before he finds us.”

“And I'm doing it with you.”

“Hana…”

“No, Leon.” I am scared for him too. He is not going to take all the risk and try to keep me safe.

Our arms are crossed as we stare each other down. The words get stuck in his throat, and he is about to think his argument at me, but I cheat and throw all my feelings at him. Everything I'm feeling. For him.

One last time, he tries to order me, “Just do as I say, you crazy broad!”

I focus psi at the carpet under my feet, convert the plastech, lift myself up on a growing footstool until my eyes are even with his.

“You. Are. Not. Going. Without. Me.”

He throws his hands up and stalks off to the balcony. Lights a cig, puffs away.

I sink into the couch in my living room, trying hard to push away the urge to shiver.

After Barrens burns through half a pack, I see him let out a massive sigh, his great shoulders deflating. He comes back in.

“This is the deal. You do what I say to stay safe. And when I think I'm getting close, I will let you know, and if it ain't impossible, I'll take you with.”

 

 

When Barrens and I began our foray into the hidden, I was cavalier in response to his safety concerns.

Now, it no longer feels so paranoid. I accept his desire to shadow me on my way to and from work to watch for others watching for me. Every evening, he reminds me to check my tablet for worms or spybots. He screens my apartment for listening devices and more subtle psionic recorders while I sleep—I know because I have seen the detection gear in his duffel bag in the morning.

I find myself noticing every stranger in City Planning, wondering whether he or she belongs, afraid I'll be caught looking. Among the many hundreds of individuals that I pass every day, is there one with a violent secret, a destructive urge that, for some reason, is indulged by the Noah's Central Council?